Page 16 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

tive to content, whether books are printed or digital. In a study published in 2011, based upon 1,100 sources, Hilbert and López showed that books represented only 1% of the world’s stored information as early as 1986.7 Not surprisingly, perhaps, in May 2011 the bulk of Internet traffic (49.2%) in North America was real-time entertainment applications—chiefly film downloads with their very large files—and it was predicted that entertain- ment downloads might represent 60% of Internet traffic in North America by the end of 2011. In June 2011 it was reported that social networks were used by 90% of Internet users in the United States, for an average of more than four hours per month. This growth in Facebook and other social net- working sites was taking web users away from the so-called “document web“ which includes documents such as digital books, or essays like the one you are presently reading.8
Is it ironic that indexing and searching technology for digital informa- tion assists research on analog records, including books? Data scanned from print into the ocean of bits and bytes becomes more quantifiable, more readily accessible, in the sense of an encyclopedia article, an image, or in some cases an online digital facsimile, assisting us far more than hindering research, making my project possible. But, as some scholars observed as long ago as the Middle Ages, access to increasing quantity inevitably raises issues of overload, of quality, requiring efforts in focus and evaluation. What may be most difficult in comparing old and new technologies with respect to these very general topics is the necessity of thinking about the unique and special, such as a famous illuminated manuscript or papyrus roll, or small groups of people listening to a book being read aloud in the ancient world, and then thinking about the opposite of unique—the socially pervasive, Internet social media issues, and back again, requiring frequent change of
7 Hilbert, M. and López, P., “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Com- pute Information,” Science 332 (2011): 60-65. The authors followed this paper with “How to Measure the World’s Technological Capacity to Communicate, Store, and Compute Information. Part I: Results and Scope,” Interna- tional Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 956-979.
8 In revisiting and revising these essays in 2020 I saw little historical value in attempting to up- date rapidly changing statistics.
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